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Irish Newspaper ABC Circulation September 2012

Starting with the tabloids as it, historically, is a decent month for them. But not for all of them as The Sun took a hit of some 1,100 month on month. The Mirror was down 800 and the Daily Star just maintained the previous months figure.

Perhaps this was due in part to the finals of the Football and Hurling and offering the supporters a promotion on their home turf. The Daily Star targeted the Mayo, Donegal, Galway and Kilkenny population with a €1 “to celebrate” (an all to clichéd phrase) their county reaching the All Ireland Finals – Kilkenny and Galway getting two weeks out of the promotion.It’s the only time this year you’ll see the Daily Star on a price parity with The Sun and Daily Mirror. Seemingly, the offering lead to “significant lifts” in circulation in the participating counties for the weeks of the promotion – so those days of glassing over listening to the theories on Price Elasticity weren’t completely waited when you can see the theory in real life.

September will also be memorable for “Middlegate”. In a “service to our readers”, said the editor of the Daily Star, they decided to print topless pictures of Kate Middelton – as a service naturally. In order to make matters worse you simply compound that decision with some disastrous PR the following day and you’re laughing. It’s impossible to say what the actual sale was that day or did pictures of Kate with her kit off do anything for the numbers. The certainly did something to infuriate the UK shareholders.

In the Sundays, very little happened. Once again, the status quo was more or less maintained with very small increases and decreases all round bar the Daily Star on Sunday who dropped nearly 8,000 copies or 25% of their sale. There’s no note in the ABC Cert to indicate why this might be, as it seems to be too much to high a figure to be a mass exodus of purchasers. Between that and a strange figure (looks like a miss calculation) in the Daily Star cert we’ve emailed the ABC to see if they can throw a any light in the subject.